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By Root 1278 0

rose over him: if he felt scared, the ocean won; if he didn’t, he won. It was really such a good game—because the waves were so beautiful and green when they rose before him, and he was watching their beauty and wondering why blue water turned green when it was really clear —that he forgot to feel the fear and won each round handily after the first few. He was not thinking of Sally at all, and hadn’t really thought of her since she had stood up to go and he had squinted up at her directly into the glare from the beach and seen her almost angry expression as she turned to go. Now he wasn’t thinking about much of anything, just watching the beautiful water. He had even forgotten about the tides, and so it was with a sense of genuine surprise that he watched one wave rise much higher than the others and race toward him, hitting him across the chest; he felt himself picked up like a leaf, felt a gentle force with greater strength than he had ever experienced carry him back across the reef, rolling him now over the rock and then landing him in the lagoon, his arms and legs flying. He had a mouthful of salt water, and it tasted bitter. He flailed around trying to get his balance, and accidently his feet touched bottom, and abruptly he stood up. He was about twenty feet from where he started, in calm water up to his waist. The breakers seemed a long way off; as he watched, another one climbed the reef and sent a line of dirty suds toward him. He rubbed his mouth and laughed. He turned, thinking of Sally, and saw her standing, far away, beneath the bluff, her hands at her sides. He could not tell at that distance if she looked frightened or not, but he waved his arm to show he was all right and began wading toward her.

“You crazy jackass,” she said angrily. He felt suddenly like a little boy.

“I won’t do it again, Mommy,” he said.

Three skin divers in black wet-suits came down the bluff from the parking area, big, bulky men with gunnysacks and snorkel breathers and face masks in their hands; one of them saw Jack’s wet clothes, already beginning to steam in the sunshine, and laughed and said, “Fall in the water, buddy?”

“Fuck you, Mac,” Jack snarled at him. The man looked horrified, and moved away with his friends.

“For heaven’s sake,” one of them said.

Both Jack and Sally were happy and tired as they drove back to the city, even though they had headaches from the glare. They resolved that next time they came to the beach they would wear sunglasses.

When they got home they wanted to make love, but they were too tired. So they just took hot baths, and Sally went to bed with a book and Jack went to work. When he returned at two thirty she was sound asleep. With real relief he crawled in beside her, feeling the warmth of her body, and sank into a delicious, life-giving sleep.

Twenty-One

Sally’s boredom with Jack’s program of discovery soon turned into criticism. He did see things from a rather special point of view, and after a while he was no longer listening to her recommendations as carefully, nor was he accepting her judgments of what was good and what was bad. Sometimes it got pretty irritating. Once, for example, he spent a month wading through Ulysses, which Sally told him was the greatest novel ever written. He threw it aside late one night and said to her, “Baby, I just can’t cut it. That book’s as full of shit as a Christmas goose. It’s too much for me. I like Bloom a lot, but I can’t stand his goddam crazy wife or that asshole Stephen. He’s just a turd. I don’t want to read about turds.”

“Maybe it is a little too advanced for you,” she said. She was, Jack realized, just sitting there doing nothing, and probably had been ever since he got home, and God knows how long before that.

“Maybe it is,” he said. “Maybe I should go back to comic books. How the hell can you sit there doin nothin? Don’t you go nuts?”

“I’m thinking,” she said. “But maybe you don’t know anything about that.”

“Oh, boy,” was all he could think of to say.

She giggled. “`Stephen Dedalus is a turd.’ That’s something you might see on the